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T-Mobile Ends Contracts and Subsidies
AlphaWolf_HK writes "In what I see as a refreshing change, T-Mobile, the fourth largest carrier in the U.S., has made sweeping changes to its service, ending both phone subsidies and service contracts. Its CEO said, 'Here's the deal: If we suck this month, go somewhere else. If we're good, stay with us.' As part of that change, the new base plan will include unlimited access, including voice, text, and data. Data will be restricted to edge speeds after 500MB with no overage costs, but can be upgraded to 2.5GB for $10, or unlimited for $20. Portable Wi-Fi hotspot usage is also unrestricted for no additional cost. In addition, LTE services just went live in eight markets. As is already standard practice with T-Mobile, you are free to bring your own device. To keep customers from having to front the full cost of the phone with unsubsidized plans, they'll let people pay off phones in installments. They're also getting the iPhone 5 next month for $650."
It is supposed to be 500MB. You don't usually "upgrade" from 500GB to 2.5GB of data for $10 a month.
It sounds like T-Mobile is going to be offering reasonable, attractive cell phone plans. Wow. I'm genuinely surprised that such a large carrier is moving in this direction. Good on them.
The best plans, the best prices, the best phones, and the hottest spokesgirl.
I can only hope the big 2 will follow along.
I've always said English was my second language. Had Romeo and Juliet been written in C, I might have understood it.
This is a bold step for T-Mobile and I hope that they succeed. However I am somewhat concerned as I have already seen too many people complain that they'd have to foot the bill for the full cost of the phone. The math would may prove to be difficult for people who are not good at it.
They are the weakest of the Big 4 and are going all in. I hope it works, if only to keep AT&T / Verizon honest.
However I am somewhat concerned as I have already seen too many people complain that they'd have to foot the bill for the full cost of the phone. The math would may prove to be difficult for people who are not good at it.
They could phrase it like this:
Pay Later: $199 down + $15/month for 24 months
Pay Now: $549
The down payment on the Pay Later choice would reasonably match the price with contract on other carriers.
If they really were thinking about customers, the contract would be a no-penalty cancel-anytime-you-want contract that would lock you in for a specific price for a non-trivial amount of time.
I'm skeptical and will stick with AT&T out of laziness for a while. Prove me wrong T-Mobile and I'll switch. But even though cellular has been one-sided customer-screwing contracts since the inception of the service - contracts can actually protect _both_ parties if you do them right. No contract == No guarantee.
Is ending subsidization really going to appeal to the mass consuming public? How many teenagers have $650 for a new iPhone? You'd think they'd offer some kind of optional secondary loan plan where you pay off a little bit every month, or owe the whole amount if you want to change carriers.
you didn't even need to click into the article to see that is exactly what they are doing, summary itself says
To keep customers from having to front the full cost of the phone with unsubsidized plans, they'll let people pay off phones in installments.[
If only there as an article that talks about T-Mobile doing that very thing~
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Why is this? Other than 'muricans are dim fucks that put up with any shit?
The problem is that one can't just start his own cell phone network, with blackjack and hookers, because an oligopoly of four companies have snapped up effectively all the spectrum in the cellular bands. One must either put up with what the spectrum cartel offers or do without cellular service. If you believe I've presented a false dilemma, please feel free to explain your third option.
I'd much rather pay for the phone up front than give the phone company a loan on their terms. This is especially true since the current model is ridiculous. You buy a phone and it is "subsidized" over 2 years. Fine, except that at the end of the 2 years your plan's price doesn't go down to represent the fact that you've paid off the phone. In fact you're stuck paying the subsidy for absolutely no service at all! It's outrageous and they've been getting away with it for decades now. The worst part is that with most companies you can bring your own phone in, and they will still charge you the subsidy anyway. They have only been getting away with it because all of the companies do it so there is no real competition. With T-Mo finally giving people an option, we'll have to see if that particular ripoff can stand.
I read the internet for the articles.
Let's check out the fine print (is unlimited data really unlimited? etc., etc.) but if T-Mobile is honestly offering unlimited calls, data, tethering, and text without a contract then NOW you can vote with your dollars and switch. If you miss this opportunity to support them on this and send a real message to the other carriers, then you have no right to complain about the state of cell phone service in the US.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
I hope the FTC takes note of this. Good things are happening because companies have to innovate to compete instead of take refuge in mega-mergers.
I am currently a T-mobile customer, and had a chance to look over the plans. Very excited by this new approach, and hope other providers follow suit.
It's important to note however that tethering (Smartphone Mobile HotSpot, or SMH) is not unlimited, even with the unlimited data plans. The unlimited data plan included 500MB of tethered data, and you can buy more (apparently for $10 per 2GB, but not confirmed.) If you're primarily interested in tethered data, it might make sense to buy the 2.5GB plan, which costs $10 less, and includes 2.5GB of tethered data.
Unfortunately, it looks like T-mobile may be eliminating some of it's other low cost plans with this move. My current plan is $30/mo for more 1500 talk/text minutes, and 30MB of data. 30MB is enough to check a map when I need it, and I can use wifi for my typical data use.
If you have concerns about T-Mobile's coverage, you can supplement it by purchasing an inexpensive daily use phone from Verizon. Pay $2/day when you're traveling outside a T-Mobile coverage zone.
I used to go through 500MB easily in one surfing session before NoScript. Webmasters using modern tools think nothing of sending you whatever you will accept, such as a ten megabyte video streaming file to open up and play on the side as an ad for cars or some movie trailer...
Once people begin being charged for this, they are apt to adopt technologies which block ads, and webmasters-paid by the ad transmitted-will do all in their power to send anything only after they have confirmed the ad streams are transferring. Many business sites have already adopted such technology, and they will be very expensive to visit.
I would almost like to see NoScript start flashing a dollar sign next to sites which need to be enabled. Then load the executive computers with NoScript so the executives who hired the webmaster will see what their customers are seeing. One of the biggest problems we have had on the internet is the executives are generally running on high-speed local networks using a monolithic browsing system and do not get a true "customer experience" when visiting their own site.
But it can also be argued that the CEO of large corporations time is too valuable to be wasted having a customer experience.
I wonder if the next big wave of lawsuits will be over people "stealing" content from the web because they adopted ad-refusal technologies.
I have already lived long enough to see lawsuits where unauthorized access to as little as a song invoked thousands of dollars in legal fees, while tax havens specifically crafted to avoid tax collections, operating in the Caribbean and Indonesian islands, continue to operate. This one-sided law is wearing heavily on my respect for law - its seeming more and more like organized muggery every day.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
In case you haven't noticed (by reading the summary) you can now do these things with t-mobile.
http://www.justsaypictures.com/images/stupid-europeans-or-are-they-americans.jpg
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
..... are shockingly expensive.
It amazes me that in the US you're expected to pay extra for voicemail, SMS packages, tethering etc. These are the basic services that make even a dumb phone usable. Without them, you may as well be sending smoke signals.
I'm currently with 3 Ireland. I paid €100 for my HTC Explorer. I pay €20 per month for unlimited SMS messages, unlimited data, unlimited calls to numbers on the same network, unlimited weekend calls to any number. Every time I top up by €20, I get €10 free credit. I get free tethering to my laptop. The only time my credit is used is when I call numbers during the week that aren't on the 3 network.
Ireland is a small country with four main networks. Competition is pretty tough, but having a mobile phone is pretty cheap. My 8 year old nieces and nephews have their own phones, and pay for the majority of their credit themselves from pocket money etc.
One of the universal rules of happiness is always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual
The carrier who would be best positioned (at least in Europe) to offer a decent data roaming option due to their relationship with the German carrier of the same name, and who partially owns them, only provides the insane price of $15 per MB (yes, per megabyte) for international data roaming. For comparison, Verizon and AT&T provide 100 MB for $20...
"You'd think they'd offer some kind of optional secondary loan plan where you pay off a little bit every month"
Oh man. You deserve every bit of ridicule that comes your way.
Is not it the job of banks to lend money? Use your credit card to finance your purchase. If you have no financial credit and you don't have a credit card, why are you buying expensive gadgets?, buy a simple phone because obviously you should not be wasting money on them
The Nexus 4 does also speak LTE on Band 4, which supposedly T-Mobile supports. You have to downgrade the flash radio on the Nexus 4 because the latest update disabled LTE. Still, just another reason to buy a Nexus 4, besides the smoking price and unlocked/un-carrier-crufted Android OS. The Galaxy IV and HTC One are arguably better if much more expensive phones, but for $299 you're in the territory of what a carrier might charge you to purchase a new device on contract anyway, and you get an unlocked phone instead. I'm hoping Google upgrades the Nexus line again before too long, preferably with a removable battery this time.
The base plan is 500 MB of LTE/HSPA+/3G (whatever you can get where you are), then it's throttled to 2G/EDGE once you go past that. I like that in this situation. T-Mobile is advertising the amount of high speed data in big letters, rather than in the small text under the words "unlimited data". They're also making overage costs disappear. And you can pay for unlimited high speed data, and for unlimited high speed data with tethering, and less exorbitant than usual rates.
It's really good that one of the big carriers are doing something different. I hope it works out for them.
Utterly wrong, and ignorant of the very definition of "competition". Usually regulation works to PREVENT competition by helping a large entity prevent smaller competitors from succeeding.
Maybe, i'm feeding the troll here, but its pretty much impossible to study business/economics and not discover abuse of monopoly power, price fixing, collusion, and dozens of other practices that are outlawed because they allow a larger competitor to simply crush any upstarts. The GP is right, competition requires regulation to assure a level playing field. That regulation can be used to lock upstarts out of a field is just another case of monopoly abuse. The wierd thing is that there is plenty of "regulations" that could be repealed (see real-estate agents/broker laws for example) but that isn't the regulation that is being repealed. Instead its regulation to assure that I can't dump toxic sludge into the local creek thereby shifting a cost of business onto society.
Do a search on their website for prepaid.
To expand on what bored is saying.
Regulation can be used to restrict competition to the insiders. Real Estate is a good example. Most states require licensed realtors to offer Cadillac services – which means nobody offers a striped down version – which is why commissions are uniformly high.
On the other hand, regulation can be used to bring down the barriers to entry – see the internet. Telecom firms were required to wire up and transmit data regardless of who provided the equipment or services. Regulation helps when one side/group has a significant edge over consumers or other outside producers.
So regulation is neither good nor bad – it is how it used. (FYI, I prefer less regulation then more)
Of course having competition requires good regulations.
Utterly wrong, and ignorant of the very definition of "competition".
You are utterly wrong. Without regulation there would be no capitalism.
In the early industrial revolution of Britain it was the wild west of commerce. Rival companies could mimic the packaging of quality brands. It was also said some vendors would dust used tea leaves in lead to make them look new again to resell. These were all practices to mislead the consumer.
Sure, caveat emptor. But if the consumer is continually mislead how can they make valid choices and how can the invisible hand work. There needs to be some regulation to ensure capitalism works.
The base plan T-Mobile is touting is $50 per month for unlimited everything (500 MB data at 4G speed).
Wal-Mart sells a T-Mobile plan for $30 per month for unlimited text and data (5 GB data at 4G speed). The catch is that the plan has only 100 minutes of voice. But if you are willing to use Google Voice with Groove IP, you can use your data to talk. I have this setup and love it! Better still, if you're in WiFi range, you can stretch your WiFi even farther.